Our chief end, our main purpose, the reason we exist is to glorify and enjoy God. And we need to know how to do that. We need to know what instruction to receive and to listen to. We need to know how to read the Bible, how to understand the relationship of the Old and New Testament in offering to God true obedience. We need to recognize how Christ has performed all righteousness for us, and yet we have opportunities through real obedience to glorify God. And some of those themes we'll consider this evening in the Belgian Confession, Article 25, on the fulfillment of the law and how Jesus Christ...in what way Jesus has fulfilled the law and what that means for us in our daily living. And the truth of Article 25, it flows from Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20, where Jesus says this, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Also read Article 25 of the Belgic Confession, which you can find on page 180 in the Forms and Prayers book if you'd like to follow along. It's a very short article. In some ways, it could almost have been added on to the previous or perhaps any one of the previous several articles on the justification of sinners or the righteousness of faith or the sanctification of believers, but it can be helpful for us to focus on the relationship of Christ to the law and the relationship of the believer to the law. Article 25, the fulfillment of the law. We believe that the ceremonies and the symbols of the law have ended with the coming of Christ, and that all foreshadowings have come to an end, so that the use of them ought to be abolished among Christians. Yet the truth and substance of these things remain for us in Jesus Christ, in whom they have been fulfilled. Nevertheless, we continue to use the witnesses drawn from the law and prophets to confirm us in the gospel and to regulate our lives with full integrity, for the glory of God, according to His will. Amen. Well, as we've been focusing on, especially in the last lesson of the Belgic Confession, the study of the summary of basic Christianity, one of the implications of trusting in Jesus is a new desire to live according to God's will. It's not a native, inherent desire. It's a new affection that the Lord works in us. We talked about how faith working through love leads believers to do the works that God has commanded us in his word, as Article 24 puts it. So we have this desire to live according to God's will, that is, it is faith working through love to God, and that is faith working in real obedience. as God has commanded us. We reflected on how Jesus said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. That's not a threat any more than it is a promise. This will happen. You will obey my commandments if you love me. That's what people who love each other do. They honor the other in ways appropriate to that relationship. But all of this raises a question that Article 25 does a beautiful job of answering for the believer which commandments should Christians keep? In other words, if we're to honor the Lord, not just with our thoughts and prayers or with our intentions, but with real obedience, what regulates that obedience? What laws shall we obey? How does the Old Testament relate to the New Testament for the believer? Are the Old Testament laws, for example, concerning Jewish worship, sacrifices, the civil laws that pertain to ancient Israel, are they binding on Christians today? And some in the church would argue, yes, they are binding. We believe that to be an error, but some say yes, we should keep the Old Testament laws exactly as the Jewish people did long ago. On the other hand, you have people who would think this way, if Jesus came to fulfill the law, which he clearly has and says so in Matthew 5, 17, we may ignore Old Testament rules. Jesus has done the whole Old Testament, so we ought to just close the book of the Old Testament, or as one pastor has put it, we should unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament and just focus on the New Testament, and that's But we'll see that's an error as well. What we want to focus on this evening are several principles that help us honor God's law in light of Jesus' coming. So we should suspect that there is a difference in how we will approach the Old Testament law than how Old Testament believers did. If Christ's coming has done something, if it has accomplished something, then it will change our relationship to the law, but it does not cancel those laws or make them of no use. And so, three principles. The first is this, the law is part of God's progressive revelation. Progressive revelation is a principle of biblical interpretation in the church. And what it communicates is that the Bible is one unified book, as we've studied in the confession already, it's one unified book, but it's made up of two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament. And while no part of scripture may be broken, think about it this way, that's a phrase that that Scripture uses about itself. The Scripture cannot be broken, Jesus said. You cannot pull any part of the Bible out and expect to still have the complete revelation of God's Word. You can't break it. You can't take a chain and pull out one link and expect the two pieces on either end to hold together because you've broken that link. So God's Word cannot be broken. But there is movement in the story, and that's what progressive revelation communicates to us. The Old Testament was, in fact, the full written revelation of God, perfect in every respect. It's the full revelation of God until the New Testament completed the progressing story. And so you can't read the Old Testament as if there was no New Testament. to complete it, to help progress the story. And so, we could think of a million examples, but just think, for example, relating somewhat to this morning's sermon, that for a time, the Israelites were to worship God in a portable tent. We read about the instructions God gives to Moses in Exodus 25, build this tent, and in this tent, you shall worship me. Now, that's a command that at some point, was fulfilled by the construction of the temple. And so the Israelites could not continue to worship in the tabernacle because now God has said, here is the temple for you to worship in. And of course, we recognize, as we saw this morning, that even the temple is not permanent. There's progress, just like there is in each of our stories. We don't, and we'll get into this in a moment, we don't obey rules in the same way as adults that we did when we were children. Now hopefully there's continuity between the heart of the obedience that is rendered as children and as adults, but little ones are to conduct themselves differently than older people because there's progress in the story. We could say this, that the ceremonies and symbols of the law, now looking at all of them in the Old Testament, not just those that were fulfilled within the Old Testament, but the whole Old Testament body of ceremonies and symbols was provisional. What do we mean by that? Well, Paul, speaking for the Jewish people, says this in Galatians 3.24, the law was our guardian until... I'll supply what... Paul says in just a moment, but you see that he's recognizing the provisional character of the law. The law was our guardian as a people, as a nation, until something happened, until something changed, until the next phase of God's work of redemption. And Paul says, that is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The law was our guardian until Christ came. And then we became a new people. God's people came of age at the coming of Jesus, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And that changes their relationship to the law, Paul says. Guardians are no longer needed when a person comes of age. There's always that little bit of tension, isn't there, as a teenager? Remember when you were a teenager, or you may be a teenager now, or you're getting up to that point, and you're feeling that tension. Do I really need a guardian anymore? I'm pretty grown, I'm maybe taller than my mom, and almost as tall as my dad, and do I need that guardian? Well, at some point, you won't. At some point, you surely did. And at some point, you're kind of in the middle, and it's a little tricky. Paul applying it to the people of God is saying, look, at one point in our lives, we needed a guardian. We were immature, we were a new people of God. Remember, the Lord makes a people out of the nations of the world where there was no people of God. He draws them out, so there are new people, immature. I mean, if you question that, just think, can you believe it that in our ancestry, of believers in God, there were people in the church of the Old Testament who worshiped idols. Now, we hear that and we say, that's crazy. Within the community of believers, how would there be idol worshipers? But that's our history. They're immature people. They literally carried around images to worship. Immature. But God's people have come of age, the coming of Jesus Christ, the outpouring of His Spirit. And so, as we should expect, God now speaks to His grown-up church, consistent with old principles, but in ways appropriate to their maturity. And that's what parents are doing, right? As parents are raising older children, they're not hopefully changing the basic principles, unless you have realized that some of your older principles weren't good and you need to reform them. But the hope is that you're teaching the same principles, but the methods, the ways, the application is different. So for example, God once taught his people the principle of separation. light from darkness, good from evil, the church and the world. He once taught that principle of separation by forbidding the mixing of different fabrics in a single garment. Leviticus 19 verse 19 says that. You couldn't have two different kinds of fabric, just like you couldn't mix two different kinds of seed in a field. There never was anything harmful about mixing fabrics or mixing seeds. It's just, that's what the people of God needed at the time to recognize this principle of separation. You get that. If you're a child of five years old, you hear that and you say, well, just like how a shirt should either be all cotton or all polyester or whatever, They didn't have polyester then, but all cotton or whatever else they were made of. So I need to be separate from the world. I can't be woven into the fabric of the world. A child gets that principle. This is still God's heart. The principle of separation is not overcome, is not canceled, I should say, in the New Testament. We think of 2 Corinthians 6, verse 14, where Paul says, what does light have to do with darkness? Why would you be mingled light and darkness, the believers in the world? It's like mixing two fabrics in a single shirt. You guys know this principle, he's saying to the church. Now, the old object lesson has become antiquated. We don't need that. Mix fabrics as much as you want today. The principle doesn't change. Or to take another example, God is still overcoming darkness with light and making his kingdom come. God is still on the march, you could say. He is still reigning in heaven and he's defeating the works of the devil. We should have learned by now that this will not happen by physical conquest. And so it would be ungodly for a believer today to say, well, Deuteronomy 1 verse 21 says that I should take up my weapons and I should march out against the Canaanites and I should put them to death. After all, God says it. Oh yeah, God says it, but he says it in a different place and a different time to a different people. You now are to participate with God in overcoming darkness with light, not by killing your neighbors, but by engaging in spiritual battle. Ephesians 6, putting on the whole armor of God, standing firm in the Word of God. We're not to wage war in the way that the world does. So the principle is consistent, but the old method is unnecessary because we're not, according to Paul's metaphor, we're not little children in the church anymore. So the earlier commands that we see in the Old Testament, the ceremonial rules, the civil rules, they aren't bad. They simply belong to a different redemptive epoch. Just like when your parents used to tell you children, you may not go outside by yourself. Right? You can't just open the door as a two-year-old and wander outside and go into the woods. Parents will be scared. Well, you're 15 or 16 now. You may leave the house by yourself. You can go out in the woods and wander around. You may do that. But the principle is the same. I love you. I don't want you to get hurt. I don't want you lost. You just respond to that in ways appropriate to your age. And so we would be wrong to obey all of the Old Testament laws literally because things have changed. We'd be wrong to do it just as adults should no longer nurse from their mother or get paddled by their father. It's not appropriate after a certain age. It was perfectly appropriate at a certain point. But we're in a different place today. And so as one writer puts it, to disregard the uniqueness of each step in the old dispensation will lead to unwholesome perversions. Think, for example, of, as we somewhat considered this morning, some Christians, misread Ezekiel 40 through 48 in several ways. One, seeing that it is a blueprint for building a new temple. Two, assuming that that temple hasn't already been built and must now be built with its support from Christians. And then also that in that temple it should be the restoration of sacrifices, because after all, there were sacrifices commanded in the Bible, and so that ought to be continued. Well, it fails to come to terms with the progressive revelation of God. God has given more information, and so it's infantile to go back to those earlier commands and say, well, he said it, and so we have to do exactly. Now, we'll nuance that in just a moment, We have to recognize in terms of knowing how to know and do God's law, we have to recognize that the law is part of God's progressive revelation. There's progress in the story. Second is this principle. Christ fulfills the law without abolishing it. He fulfills the law. He makes that careful distinction in Matthew 5.17, doesn't he? He won't allow us to say, I've canceled the law, but he also won't allow us to think there's nothing different about our relation to the law now because of Christ. So here's what Jesus means by that. Jesus said in many places, Luke 24 is one example, that the Old Testament was written about him. and is fulfilled in him. And he explains to the disciples certain passages. Do you not see how this was written about me and now it's done its job? It's identified me, it's pointed believers to me. So for example, symbols such as sacrificial animals and the temple and ceremonies like circumcision prepared the world for the coming of Christ. How do you frame the idea that Jesus would offer himself as a sacrifice for sin? You frame that by generations of sacrifices that were inadequate, but got you understanding what God requires here. He requires total sacrifice of a perfect, flawless victim, and it's fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Or the temple, how do you, as we considered this morning, how do you think about a holy God being willing to meet with sinful people in one place? Well, the temple helps to do that, or circumcision, right? How do you practice separation from the world and cutting out sin, practicing circumcision of the heart? Well, there's a symbol for that that the Lord used in the Old Testament. Hebrews 10 provides language that the Belgic Confession uses here. It's like this, the law cast a shadow of Christ from heaven. You might think about it a little bit like an eclipse, where there's a shadow coming down from the heavens, and that eclipse, the shadow is on the ground, and so you know something's happening. There's this unusual shadow we witnessed a year and a half ago. But you don't look at the shadow. Eventually, you... With proper eye care, you look up and you try to see where is that shadow coming from? You try to see the real thing, the moon and the sun coming into alignment. Christ cast a shadow of himself into the world through the law. The law was that shadow. But his coming made the shadow obsolete, as Hebrews 8 verse 13 says. And that's certainly not... a low view of the law, it's a high view. It was Christ in shadow form. And so, for that reason, to continue sacrificing animals not only fails to reckon with progressive revelation, but it would actually undermine the finished work of Jesus Christ. You'd be continually focusing on the shadow, and now that Christ has actually come, it's in competition with the one who cast the shadow. And so, the confession is right to say that all foreshadowings have come to an end so that the use of them ought to be abolished among Christians. They've come to an end, they've been filled up, they have done their job, they've pointed to Christ, and now Christ has come. And so, Christ is, of course, the reason that there's a difference in the function of the civil and ceremonial law. And yet, while believers must no longer practice the Old Testament shadows, the confession is right to say that the truth and substance of these things remain for us in Jesus Christ, in whom they have been fulfilled. And so, as we'll Consider in a moment, you read your Bible and you come into these descriptions of circumcision, or the sacrifices, or the allotment of land, and all of them in one way or another are telling you about Jesus. And so you'd be foolish to cancel them or to cut them out and say, well, these are old and we don't need them anymore. They're testifying of Jesus. They are the material that Jesus himself used and the apostles used to help people in their day understand him better. Every Old Testament passage still speaks about Christ who fulfills all the promises of God. Jesus didn't abolish the law or the prophets, he fulfilled them. He filled them up, he showed them their real, meaning, their real purpose, their real value. Scripture then finds its fullest meaning in him. The scriptures in the Old Testament are by him, they're for him, they're about him. And so one writer says this, it is an enigma, the Old Testament is. It's a mystery. It's a puzzle that you can't open up properly. Unless the one who reads it sees the Lord Jesus Christ at its core. Because otherwise you're left wondering, yeah, why don't we do sacrifices anymore? If you don't see Jesus there anymore, why don't we do all of these things? Why don't we have a temple? We should have a temple. The Bible says we should have a temple. If you fail to see Jesus at its core, the Old Testament's an enigma. You don't know what to do with it. And so, Jesus fulfilled the law by doing what the law was suggesting he would do, by dying on the cross and thereby satisfying forever the demands of the law against those who would believe in him. The law, after all, demanded obedience as well as sacrifices that had to be offered for disobedience. That law doesn't change. It simply gets answered by Jesus. The law still demands obedience and sacrifices for those who are disobedient. That law is not abrogated by Christ, it's not canceled. It's answered by Jesus Christ. You're still obligated to obey the law in its entirety, in the sense that you're to render perfect obedience to God. And if you don't, you should be punished everlastingly in hell. That law is right and saying that same thing still to this day, but now we have the answer that is clear in the New Testament, and the answer is Jesus Christ. You must be trusting in Christ. Otherwise, the law is against you. And you must answer it in its expectation of perfect obedience and its demand for total payment for disobedience if Christ isn't answering it for you. For the unbeliever, the law only leads to Christ as judge. For the believer, the law leads to Christ as our substitute, as our replacement. And so, as we've considered recently, Romans 10 verse 4 says, truly, Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. And so, to understand the relationship of the two testaments and our responsibility before the law, we need to recognize that Christ fulfills the law without abolishing it. And then third, is this principle, God's law still reveals His will. It still reveals God. It still reveals what He's all about. It still has value. And this may become more apparent to us if we distinguish three kinds of laws in the Old Testament, three categories or types of law. One category is what we've already referred to as the ceremonial laws. They dictated Israel's worship, his requirement of purity for this set-apart people. So there are very detailed, strict rules for worship. You know, how far you could walk on the Lord's Day, what kind of sacrifice you... should bring, and who should offer it, and how, and what days certain sacrifices were offered. These are ceremonial laws. And these laws, though outdated for the reasons we just described in the previous point, they still help us appreciate God's holiness. God is not less holy today. These laws help us treasure the gift of righteousness in Jesus Christ. A second category of laws are what we might call civil laws. These defined God's government of national Israel. We might compare them today to the laws of a state or a municipality, a city, or a nation. And these laws, too, do not apply to us in the same way. God's kingdom has expanded beyond Israel. We are not ruled under the Old Testament laws. That setup, it was changed in the coming of Christ and the expansion of the church beyond corporate Israel. And yet, while God's kingdom has expanded beyond Israel, these laws too show us God. They show us that God is king. They, as one person put it, resound with the overtones of His gracious covenantal dealings with His people. As you read these national laws about how this body of Israelites was to function with regard to outsiders and with regard even to such things that you might find strange to be in the Bible, that is like railings need to be put around upper story balconies so that you don't fall off, or your children don't fall off, or your neighbor doesn't get hurt. These kinds of civil laws reveal, almost in this case like a building code, reveal the goodness of God and his concern for our neighbors. The third category is the moral law, and only the moral law, which we have summarized for us in the Ten Commandments, and which, importantly, predate the giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai. That's really just a summary of what had already been true since creation. Only the moral law is binding for all people. So we have that distinction between those three types of laws. We continue to uphold the moral law. We must. It's not for Israel. It's for all people. But even the ceremonial and civil laws are important for believers today. We should love God's whole law. We should love the whole Bible. We shouldn't scoff at certain portions of Scripture and say, oh, how stupid, that's an Old Testament law about mixing fabrics or mixing seeds or whatever it is. And we should study to see how every law still speaks to us today. And the confession helps us immensely by providing two applications for how a reflection upon these Old Testament laws can help us today. First of all, it says this, that these laws, even the ones that don't apply to us in the same way today, they confirm us in the gospel. They confirm us in the gospel. I'll just give a few illustrations of what that might look like. Just take, for example, this law in Deuteronomy 21 verses 22 and 23 that requires hung criminals to be buried on the same day. That's a law in Israel. It was a requirement. If you hang a criminal, if you crucify a criminal or hang him on a tree, he needs to be taken down that same day. Otherwise, there'll be a blight upon the land. Now, understand, that law is not providing believers today instructions on how to properly perform a crucifixion, right? We do not read it that way. It's a civil law, certainly with ceremonial implications. What is it doing then for us today? Well, it's confirming us in the gospel. as Paul does when he goes back to Deuteronomy 21, verses 22 and 23, in Galatians 3, verse 13, and connects it to Christ, and says that that law that a convicted criminal who's hung out before the people to see his shame, He should be taken down that day so he doesn't curse the earth. It reminds us that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. Christ had to be taken down from that cross. So great was his shame and his sin bearing for us. So we don't read that law in the Old Testament and say, wow, that's useless. It's telling us about when a convicted criminal needs to come down from a tree that he's been hung on. No, it's not useless, it confirms us in the gospel. Or just to take one other of hundreds and hundreds of examples that you could find, Scripture allows, I don't know if you've thought about this before, but Scripture allows different kinds of offerings to be brought by different families, by different types of people. You should ordinarily bring a lamb, but Scripture allows, For example, Leviticus 5, verse 7, for a poor family or a poor person to bring instead of a lamb, which you can imagine being a significant cost for a poor family, they could bring a bird, a pigeon, or two pigeons. And you see in that, of course, not instructions for, you know, what you should be bringing for you're offering next Sunday. You don't apply that in its literal way, it's been fulfilled in Christ. But what we see here is that no one is too lowly to come to Jesus. No one can say, well, I haven't had all the...I don't have all the right things. You know, no one could say, well, I don't have a lamb so I can't come to God. No, just bring your pigeons, bring your little birds. And so, no one today can say, well, Jesus won't receive me because I'm not enough. Of course you're not enough. You come trusting in the blood of Jesus Christ and He will receive you. Those laws can help us understand that. There's a second way that the law can be a blessing to us today, even those parts that do not apply to us in the same way because they've been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And that is put this way, God's law regulates our lives with full integrity. Now, this is a little more nuanced here because we're pondering now the civil and ceremonial law, which we've said have been fulfilled in Christ, and so do not carry over one-to-one from the Old Testament into the New Testament. And yet, they can regulate our lives with full integrity. What might that mean? Let me just, again, give a few examples. Mention how the Jewish Sabbath is very particular with all of the specific things that must be done or more often what may not be done that's been fulfilled in Christ. It is the Lord's Day. It is all about Jesus. And so we don't count our steps on the Lord's Day to see if we've exceeded the number that we can take on Sunday. And there's many other things that we could mention. But the codes of the Sabbath still impress upon us the need for us today to render to God careful and regular worship. God is not expecting less from us today. Right? We haven't entered into an age of laxness when it comes to approaching God. Jesus said in the text we read in Matthew chapter 5, I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. You can't relax the law. You can't say that God, his character has changed and so therefore you can come to him lightheartedly and casually and with no interest in obedience. No. Careful, regular worship. Or take another example from Exodus chapter 12. The Passover regulations explain how outsiders could not eat the meal without first being received into God's family. That was a strict rule that God enforced upon his people. Oh, we don't practice the Passover today. We don't have that. rule in its essential form. And yet it teaches us many things, not the least of which the importance of regulating attendance at the Lord's Supper. The principle is still there. This is a family meal that commemorates the gift of our Lord Jesus Christ and it ought to be regulated appropriately. But it also teaches us the necessity of loving strangers and helping them join the church. God says, a stranger may not just come uninvited to the Passover and consume it. A stranger may come to the Passover when he's no longer a stranger, when he's been received into the family of God and he's accepted the terms of the covenant and so on. The word of God is, living, active, and useful to us today. The whole Bible is God's word. It's all about Jesus, and every part should lead us to him. We recognize, and let me just conclude this message with this Summary of what we've considered this evening. We recognize that the ceremonies and symbols of the law Legislated a different people at a different time But they are not unimportant No part of God's Word is unimportant when The moon eclipses the sun, it casts a shadow on the earth, but we're not enamored by the shadow. We find it interesting, but we use that shadow to go to the source of that. We want to see what has caused it. And in a similar way, we should use the shadows of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament to lift the eyes of our faith to Jesus Christ to rest in Him, to find in Him all that has been demanded by God of us. We do not relax the demands of the law, we find them just to be satisfied in Jesus. And then we devote ourselves to doing His will for God's glory. Jesus has fulfilled the law for us, that is our salvation. Now Jesus says to us, if you love me, Go keep my commandments, live for my glory and enjoy the life of obedience. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you for the clarity that we can gain by listening to the voices of those who have gone before us and sorting out the continuity and discontinuity between the Old and the New Testaments, principles of interpretation and ways that Christ has fulfilled the Old Testament without rendering it meaningless. Help us to love the whole Bible and to see Christ in all of His glory, even in passages that we will not do the way that they have been perfected in Jesus Christ. Help us to love your holy law in Jesus' name. Amen.